Author Archive
Ange Mlinko
Two Chapbooks
Harriet writers have an open invitation to post even after their contract expires, but not many of us do so. The intensity of professional blogging for three to six months is exhausting, and the exposure may leave one feeling, months later, unnerved. Nevertheless, there is always news. Why not share it here? I am thinking of two recent chapbooks, both by young women, both enamored of language like summer foliage, dense and floral, practically Shakespearean — one is, after all, called Sonnets, and the other is called Comedies. Warning: Some of the language herein may not be suitable for …
Ange Mlinko
Poetry Bookshop
Hello Harriet readers! Just a quick alumni news flash. In this time of dying bookstores, here’s a bright spot: a poetry bookshop in Beacon, NY called Hermitage. It opened in December, “focusing primarily on small press publishing in American poetry between the 1950’s to 1970’s.” If you’re looking for The Green Lake Is Awake or The Hotel Wentley Poems or a full run of Locus Solus, you will want to come here. It is only one room, adjacent to an art gallery whose current exhibition features typographical visual art. The proprietors, Jon Beacham and Christian Toscano, have a letterpress upstairs and ambitions for publications, readings, and more art. In their statement, found on their website, they explain, “Hermitage resulted from the frustration of the current model of how much of art and culture is presented by galleries, institutions, and other organizations.” In the wake of various discussions on Harriet past and present—discussions touching on AWP and the marketing of poetry—it is worth pointing out that an older, DIY model of distribution still exists. It requires only passionate conviction and community. Oh, and low rent!
Ange Mlinko
Story
It was Sunday, 40 degrees with a snowstorm on the way. What do people do in the suburbs? I put on some Elliott Smith and went down to the riverfront.
Ange Mlinko
Some Debts
The January issue of Poetry goes live next week, along with my essay-review of new books by Mary Kinzie and Robert Pinsky. There was a bit that took me too far afield, so I excised it from the final draft. Still, it might hold some interest for someone somewhere! Readers of Pinsky’s Gulf Music know the book meditates at length on the etymology of the word “thing.” He even includes the dictionary definition as a sort of found poem, lingering on the irony that “thing” used to mean something more along the lines of an assembly, an address, and even a “giving voice to,” rather than “a concrete object, a physical or bodily thing.” This movement from thing as process to thing as object fueled the meditations of another poet—thirty years ago.
Ange Mlinko
The Flame Hatches
Here in upstate New York near the St. Lawrence River, bordering the expanse of that fabled northern land called Canada, I was awestruck by sunrise, the first sunrise after the solstice!
UTTERANCE
crack the red wax open
read note readdress dispatch
so he enabled the correspondences
of others and to be so occluded
by the flux of words gave pleasure
as crescendo filled the branchings
flickering the quilled exchanges
until one particular melody exhausted
silence and called out spontaneous
response:
abyssal the flame hatches
That’s from the Irish poet Trevor Joyce’s new book What’s in Store—a three-hundred-plus-page veritable bodega. (I discovered it through my favorite blog here, entry for Dec. 13.) There are translations and reworkings of: “Folk Songs from the Finno-Ugric and Turkic Languages,” “Anonymous Love Songs from the Irish,” the Chinese poets Ruan Ji and Lu Zhaolin, as well as maybe half a dozen other sources. There are also short lyrics addressed to friends and loved ones. In light of all the Harriettalk about constraints and sonnets, one of the endnotes provides a tonic to too much purely formal ambition:
Ange Mlinko
The Sonnet’s Malice
I didn’t think I had anything to say about the sonnetfest here on Harriet. But then a friend sent me an article about Edwin Denby: great American ballet critic, friend of Frank O’Hara’s circle, poet who wrote many, many sonnets. I had studied them years ago, and then put the book away (sonnets not being my cup of tea). I opened Collected Poems again this week, and have been unable to put it down since.
THE SUBWAY
The subway flatters like a dope habit,
For a nickel extending peculiar space:
You dive from the street, holing like a rabbit,
Roar up a sewer with a millionaire’s face.
Squatting in the full glare of the locked express
Imprisoned, rocked, like a man by a friend’s death,
O how the immense investment soothes distress,
Credit laps you like a huge religious myth.
It’s a sound effect. The trouble is seeing
(So anaesthetized) a square of bare throat
Or the fold at the crotch of a clothed human being:
You’ll want to nuzzle it, crop at it like a goat.
That’s not in the buy. The company between stops
Offers you security, and free rides to cops.
Ange Mlinko
“Everything Is the Nuts”
If anyone can figure out how to send Jane back to 1949 to see MoMA’s exhibition of “Italian pictures,” which gave Wallace Stevens a bad case of ennui, please send instructions care of this comment box. I thought I would take the opportunity to point out that the museum seemed to be in a lull a month before their 20th-anniversary show “Modern Art in Your Life,” and the interregnum of September in New York—“covered with the dust and withering of summer”—seemed at least partly to account for his mood. However, there’s a little bit in his sour-lemon passage that seems worth teasing out…
Ange Mlinko
Versions of Songs, Versions of Weariness
Alicia’s post in tribute to Edward Thomas’s “The Owl” moved me. Especially so since it came after a terrible experience in a shopping outlet. My four-year-old and I were looking for snow boots and while we shared a sandwich in a packed food court I realized that I was only just starting to hear the pounding music in the backdrop: Christmas carols set to frenzied electronic beats.
My favorite carol this year has been O Holy Night. It’s the music that makes the carol, and I’ve had fun dowloading different versions of it to compare. How to sing the words “Fall on your knees:” with soaring sternness like Bing Crosby, or hushed reverence like Josh Groban? You can chart a Melisma-meter with the versions on offer by Avril LaVigne, LeAnn Rimes, and Cristina Aguilera.
Steve Burt’s quote from Wallace Stevens’s letters (in Alicia’s comments section) also sent me to its source. One of the reasons to go back to a favorite poet’s letters—and Stevens never disappoints in this regard—is to confirm to oneself how uncannily history repeats itself. Or to realize maybe that it’s not history repeating itself, exactly, but our sentiments about history, our relation to it, that remains glumly constant. I had to smile, rereading a passage that I might have written on a sour day:
Ange Mlinko
The Greatness of Kenneth Koch
Don Share beat me to a post on Kenneth Koch and Patrizia Cavalli. “Talking to Patrizia” is actually one of my favorite love poems, tart and social and messy. So when I read Cavalli’s lesbian poems in Poetry I had the immediate intuition that this was the Patrizia who advised Koch to hide in the bushes. “Love/Is a god These Freudian things I don’t believe at all//This god you have to do what/He wants….” Of course, I had to revisit this poem, and ended up rereading all of One Train.
Ange Mlinko
The Real Predicament
Christian Bok’s post here is a sad reminder of a persistent problem with poetry reviewers and bloggers: the dismissal of “cerebral” work and the exaltation of a crude notion of the “emotional.” Bok’s reviewer is a tad less obvious — he requires a “predicament” if not outright confessions — but still, it seems to me a code for emotional blackmail.
I’m reminded, actually, of a single sentence in this review of Robert Hass. After telling us that Hass’s poems “focus on the natural world, his private experiences, and the people and places he knows best,” the reviewer complains, “Hass’ work has a demure, sometimes evasive strain: He’d been publishing for 30 years or so before readers learned about his mother’s debilitating alcoholism.” I almost keeled over. Dear Reader, do you expect to know all about my mother too? Nobody told me this when I started writing poetry at 15, after Gerard Manley Hopkins and T.S. Eliot. Nobody even told me at my MFA program! Is it too late to go to law school?
I know of a poem that addresses the problem of art, emotion and confession …
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